Thursday, 23 June 2011

Wow!!! Light skin? This is asian beautiful secret!:)

How can rice powder lighten our skin?

There are plenty of anecdotes about how rice powder and more specifically, rice water, can keep our skin youthful and translucent looking. But why does rice powder work, exactly?

Rice contains a high concentration of PABA. PABA (para aminobenzoic acid) is a very good sunscreen. When taken internally, PABA also raises the Vitamin C levels in our bodies.

Rice also contains two other sun protecting agents – ferulic acid and allantoin.

Ferulic acid is an antioxidant. Incredibly, scientists have found that when ferulic acid is added to Vitamin C and E, its sun protection ability doubled. (Scroll down this page to read an extract of the study’s findings.)

Allantoin is a good anti-inflammatory agent. It soothes sunburns and also promotes the skin’s repair.

When applied as a paste on the skin, rice powder has been shown to inhibit tyrosinase.

Step 1. Using a clean bowl, soak some uncooked brown rice, white rice or red rice in water. A handful of rice should be more than enough.

Step 2. Run your fingers through this, as if you’re cleaning the rice.

Step 3. The water should look pretty cloudy right now. Drain this water into another clean bowl.

Step 4. Splash the ‘rice water’ over your face repeatedly. For even better skin lightening, do not towel your face dry but leave it damp to air-dry on its own.

If you have more rice water left over, you can pat the remaining water on your face and neck or refrigerate the rest.

f you’re not planning to eat the rice made from your rice water, there is one thing you can do with all that uncooked rice you used… Make it into a mask!

Here’s how:

Step 1. Grind a handful of uncooked rice into a fine powder. You can use a coffee grinder to do this.

Step 2. Add some milk to the rice powder – enough to make it into a paste.